Frankfurt Sends Its 'Bong' By
Radio

If every bus
stop had a café in front of it,
more people would wait for buses.

Whatever Happened to Tick-Tock?

by Ric
Erickson

Paris:- Monday, 9. March 1998:- This isn't going
to about anything important. Well, it is going to be about
time, but I don't know if this is important to you. I've
been pretty sloppy about it and it's bothered me for
years.

If your house is like mine you house has a lot of
clocks. In addition to power cuts, the powers whoever they
might be, decide that we should change all our clocks twice
a year.

When the cable-TV used to show the time on one of their
spare channels, every time I had to re-set the clocks I
would sit down in front of the TV with my best watch. I
would set it to 'zero' and wait for the TV-clock to hit
"zero' and if no kids of bill collectors happened by at the
wrong moment, on 'zero' I would hit the 'go' button - and
have the correct time again, for at least a couple of
seconds before it all started to unravel.

But cable-TV, in its endless wisdom, fired their TV
clock. For the last couple of years I've been getting the
time by hearsay. I tried getting it from the SNCF's
railroad clocks, but they showed so much difference between
here and Paris, that I guessed they use them for running
the trains.

Every six months rolls around with its 'set the clock
forward, back, sideways' like the waters over Niagara. I
gave up on the video-recorder clock entirely - and this has
proved a boon and saved a lot of money on buying blank
tapes, because without the clock, it can't be programmed to
record good movies.

Luckily, abandoning this clock coincided with the
cable-TV's decision not to show good movies anymore. The
oven's clock has always been a mystery to me too, and I
usually get by using an egg-timer for it despite the
nuisance of remembering to turn it over every three
minutes. Since M-R lost the egg-timer, we haven't used
the oven much if there was nobody to stare through the
glass in the door at things burning.

For about the last three years the car pool has been
running fine on three-minute-fast clocks, and catching the
half-hourly train is a snap with them too if you get to the
station 28 minutes early.

But you know, this clock business, it niggles -
somewhere is the back. It was grandmas's day in France
recently and my family got it wrong and gave me a radio
clock.

No, that's not quite right. There is no radio. It's a
radio signal from Frankfurt. It sends the right time to my
new clock, once every hour. It gives me perfect European
Central Time. It has moon phases on it too, in case I'm
into voodoo, but I haven't figured out how this part works
yet - but it is a nice display.

The best thing about the new clock is that it also says
what day it is. Here, working on the Internet, time goes on
non-stop - well often it goes on past midnight. For most
people this is just late the same day, but for us
Internetters it is another new day.

Quite often I wake up and I don't know if it is today,
yesterday or tomorrow. This is a bit worse than having
three-minute-fast clocks. Right now the time is 06:18 on
Monday, 9. March 1998. Metropole might be online by noon.
Sometime around then.

The latest issue leads with 'Jospin Balances Rigor
and Compassion' With good economic news bolstering it,
the Socialist government has announced it will fulfill a
campaign pledge to help the poor. On March 4, Lionel
Jospin's government unveiled a 51.4 billion-franc (8.5
billion dollars) plan to fight on poverty deprivation in a
country where one household in 10 lives below the poverty
line.

From the food front: Alain Ducasse now holds six
Michelin stars for his two restaurants, and Pierre Gangaire
is back in the game. The Michelin Guide, awaited each year
by chefs and gourmets the world over and treated as the
Epicurean's Bible, appeared in Paris bookstores on 2.
March.

Danses - Festival en Yvelines

From Saturday, 14. March until Saturday, 4. April, a
Yvelines Dance Festival takes place - from Achères
to Versailles, with a different program at each. Some dates
overlap, so get full information from this number: Info.
Tel.: 01 39 07 85 45.

Cinéma du
Réel

Because the Pompidou Centre is being renovated,
its
Cinema du Réel moves to the Cinéma des
Cinéastes from Friday, 13. March until Sunday, 22.
March. On the program are 30 films from throughout the
world, a competition for French films, and a retrospective
of documentaries made in Japan.

Japanese directors represented by their films will be
Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, Shinsuke Ogawa, Naomi
Kawase, Noriaki Tsuchimoto and Kazuo Hara among ohers.